Friday, October 11, 2013

Black panther Party Herman Wallace: Unrepentant Political Prisoner and Fighter for Justice

Herman Wallace, one of the Angola 3.

Herman Wallace was a courageous fighter for justice, a political
prisoner who this system locked up in conditions of torture, in solitary
confinement, for 41 years.
On Tuesday, October 1, Herman Wallace was finally freed after a
federal judge ruled that his original indictment in the killing of a
prison guard had been unconstitutional. Three days later, on Friday
morning, October 4, Herman Wallace died of cancer in New Orleans. He was
71.
The story of what the U.S. government did to him is an outrage and an
indictment of this whole system and its so-called "system of justice."
The life of Herman Wallace is one of inspiration.

The Outrageous Justice of a Heartless System

Herman Wallace spent 41 years in prison, since 1971, most of it at
the infamous Angola prison farm, which, fittingly, was a former slave
plantation on the banks of the Mississippi River.
In a radio interview earlier this year, Wallace described what it was
like to be caged in a 6 foot by 9 foot cell: "Where we stay, we're
usually in the cell for 23 hours, and an hour out. I'm not 'out.' I may
come out of the hole here, but I'm still locked up on that unit. I'm
locked up. I can't get around that. Anywhere I go, I have to be in
chains. Chains have become a part of my existence. And that's one of the
things that people have to fully understand. But understanding it is
one thing, but experiencing it is quite another."
These conditions of solitary confinement are internationally recognized as a crime against humanity. Yet it is these conditions that are routinely
meted out as punishment in this country to tens of thousands of
prisoners throughout the U.S. in "supermax" or "restrictive segregation"
units.
In 1974, Herman Wallace and Albert Woodfox, also a prisoner in
Angola, were unjustly and wrongly convicted in the stabbing death of a
prison guard. After the guard was killed, Wallace and Woodfox were
placed in solitary confinement, along with Robert King. Prison officials
claimed King was involved in the guard's death although he was never
charged with it. Together, Herman Wallace, Albert Woodfox, and Robert
King are the Angola 3.
The three spent over one hundred years in solitary for a
crime they did not commit. All three stood strong in the face of
sadistic and vengeful persecution by prison and judicial authorities.
Robert King was released from prison, after 29 years in solitary,
when a judge overturned his original conviction. Albert Woodfox is still
in prison. His conviction for involvement in the guard's death has been
overturned three times, but each time the state of Louisiana has kept
him in prison, in the torment of solitary.
The persecution and heartless torment, year after year, of the Angola
3 is a towering crime of this system that must never be forgotten, must
never be forgiven. It is a concentration of the cold reality of this
capitalist-imperialist system, and the "freedom and democracy"
proclaimed by its defenders.
The Angola 3 were singled out for punishment for blatantly political
reasons. The three were part of a generation of youth who became
radicalized in their millions during the great upheavals of the 1960s.
While in prison, these three youths from the ghettoes of New Orleans
became revolutionaries associated with the Black Panther Party. They
organized fellow prisoners and studied the history and theory of
revolution. They were an inspiration and example to prisoners and people
outside the prisons. For the Louisiana prison authorities, this was
their unforgiveable crime.
Robert King described how he became a revolutionary in prison in an
interview several years ago with Dennis Bernstein of Pacifica Radio:
"Many of the Panthers that were arrested in a shootout [with New Orleans
police] came to the Parrish Prison. I became aware of what was taking
place and I met those guys. We started to do things. We became an
extension of the Black Panther Party. We carried its program into the
Parrish Prison through certain means of communication. We started to
deal with conditions in the Parrish Prison. We organized a hunger
strike. At one time we got almost the whole prison—I think about 700
prisoners—to go on a hunger strike. The prison conditions were so
horrible."
When Robert King was sent to Angola, he was able to hook up with
Herman Wallace and Albert Woodfox, who had already started an Angola
chapter of the Black Panther Party. The brutal, utterly inhumane and
racist treatment of the Angola work farm was—and is—almost unchanged
since its days as a slave plantation in the 1800s. Armed guards on
horseback monitor gangs of Black men forced to work in the cotton and
cane fields. The minority of white prisoners are given preferential
treatment in housing, food, and everything else. Vicious beatings and
rapes are meted out as punishment. Robert King said: "Herman and Albert
and other folks recognized the violation of human rights in prison, and
they were trying to achieve a better prison and living conditions. And
as a result of that, they were targeted."
The government's case against the Angola 3 was riddled with lies,
inconsistencies, and fabrications. The state claimed it "lost" DNA
evidence favorable to the three. Bloody prints found at the scene of the
killing do not match any of the three. All three men had multiple
witnesses who testified that each of them was far from the murder scene
when the killing happened.
But Herman and Albert were convicted for the guard's murder and
punished relentlessly for their revolutionary politics. The current
Angola warden justified the decades they spent in solitary in a court
deposition: "Albert Woodfox and Herman Wallace is locked in time with
the Black Panther revolutionary actions they were doing way back when."
He said that if he released them to the general prison population "I
would have me all kinds of problems, more than I could stand."
But the three never broke. Albert Woodfox spoke for all three in the movie, In the Land of the Free
when he explained: "I thought that my cause, then and now, was noble.
So therefore, they could never break me. They might bend me a little
bit, they might cause me a lot of pain. They might even take my life.
But they will never be able to break me."

Unvanquished Revolutionary Spirit

The powers-that-be kept Herman Wallace behind bars for more than half his life, but they were unsuccessful in
breaking his spirit. From the depths of this system's horrific dungeons
Herman Wallace joined the struggle against inhumane prison conditions
and answered letters from people who wrote to him about his case. He
struck up a correspondence with an artist who asked him to describe his
"dream house"—and his drawings were then turned into a scale model that
became an art installation seen in galleries in a dozen countries. Just
think about the fact that this tremendous and creative human resource
for society, Herman Wallace, was locked up and tortured by this system for 41 years! (The documentary film Herman's House was shown on PBS in July.)
The state of Louisiana sought to punish Herman Wallace up to the moment of his death. A report on the New Orleans Times-Picayune
web site said that the District Attorney for West Feliciana Parish
re-indicted Herman for murder two days after he was released and went to
a home in New Orleans to die. The D.A. was quoted as saying "I say he
is a murderer..."
Herman Wallace spent most of his life in one of the most brutal and
racist prisons in this country. He was deprived of the most basic human
contact, day after day, for 41 years. Over and over he was tormented by
the sadistic, bottomless cruelty of this capitalist-imperialist system's
legal and police structures.
But from his tiny cell in the depths of a prison deep in the
Louisiana swamps, Herman's enormous courage and unvanquished
revolutionary spirit touched, inspired, and gave strength to countless
people around the world. Three movies have been made about the Angola 3,
and shown around the world. Thousands of people in many countries have
rallied to their defense and signed petitions for their release.
As he faced his death, Herman Wallace courageously released a final
statement: "I want the world to know that I am an innocent man and that
Albert Woodfox is innocent as well. We are just two of thousands of
wrongfully convicted prisoners held captive in the American Gulag. We
mourn for the family of Brent Miller [the murdered prison guard] and the
many other victims of murder who will never be able to find closure for
the loss of their loved ones due to the unjust criminal justice system
in this country. We mourn for the loss of the families of those unjustly
accused who suffer the loss of their loved ones as well.
"Only a handful of prisoners globally have withstood the duration of
years of harsh and solitary confinement that Albert and myself have. The
State may have stolen my life, but my spirit will continue to struggle
along with Albert and the many comrades that have joined us along the
way here in the belly of the beast.
"In 1970 I took an oath to dedicate my life as a servant of the
people, and although I'm down on my back, I remain at your service. I
want to thank all of you, my devoted supporters, for being with me to
the end."
After more than four decades of being tortured by this system, Herman Wallace was finally able to spend a few days,
able to see the sun, the moon, able to embrace loved ones—a brief
respite from the horrors of solitary confinement. His lawyers said in a
statement: "One of the final things that Herman said to us was, 'I am
free. I am free.'" But what is achingly sad—and utterly maddening—is
that this vengeful system robbed him of almost all of his adult life.
In the future, after we get rid of this system, people may ask, a new
generation may ask, "How bad was it?" The story of Herman Wallace would
certainly stand as a powerful and painful illustration of the old
society